APHASIA-ELLIPSIS (in studio)
I am making paintings in oil and collage with ink drawing, sometimes the drawing is on top of the paint, sometimes there are collage bits incorporating French and American anarchist comic books from the eighties and nineties... As objects of reverie, they hold a strong effect, carrying tokens of rough to delicate, or ropes from crude to smooth: materials are filtering, like sieves or sleeves, may breed in dirt. If 'aphasia-ellipsis' titles itself, from a set of two nouns held together for twelve years, then,
The paintings have their own half life.
The weird catch in in the throat, that this is happening in fine grain
A clear linguistic fact and experiential fact of our existence as confronted with the 'alien' in the human
At the same time as we are always barreling inside the alien cognition
Recovering a distant geography from within the self, from the earliest days of life
Birth semantics, of the chora after Kristeva, the experience of language as touch
Alien-ness as a lived personal and collective experience—every body is elated, related, proverbial--
Really hard to be with the paintings, who confront by hurling recognition-patterns from birth
Quanta reveal and prevent revelation--.a disturbing ground, an uncomfortable assimilation
The titles of the paintings might be proximate translations from a minor literature
Place-names in a legend on the lower left-hand corner of your map
The naming of paintings is a poetics of relation at a periphery which turns out to be central
Possibly the name will give a hook, a handhold while you plunge
Line is moving and coursing, a cursor flashes at various thresholds
At the point-shifts of planes and masses, shedding incidents and micro-events like droplets off the wet dog
Line scrawls through the wet prints, hunting uptakes, tracks in dark waters the shimmering bioluminescent letters
Paintings' images present mere patterned light from within ellipses...dot dash dot
An aphasia-ellipsis is an intimate and vast location, a very productive space in which to write a painting...
-Molly McPhee, Notes on Aphasia-Ellipsis, 2014